Integrating an SE and SE/30 in my workflow

[bom.cabedal]

Hi all,

First of all, apologies if this has come up before (it must have, but I couldn't find it). 

Last month I was able to purchase a recapped SE/30 from a guy near where I live (Leiden, Netherlands) with two hard drives, for next to nothing. If I assessed the situation correctly, he was pressured to sell it by Mrs. guy, and it was clear he was attached to the machine. I myself had been looking for one for a while, and now I'm looking to actually use it in my daily job. I do a lot of writing, and there's probably no better 'distraction-free' writing environment than a classic Mac with MacWrite Pro. I now have my old SE (first owner since 1989) and this 'new' SE/30.

I'm looking to upgrade the SCSI drive in both to a SCSI2SD solution at some point, and the SE/30 is going to be hooked up to Ethernet/WiFi, but right now I'm faced with the simple problem of getting my documents to and from my MacBook Pro. I have a floppy drive with the MBP and although it can read the floppies off the SE/30 I can't write TO them for reasons that are unclear to me. However, a one-way system is not that useful for obvious reasons. Can anyone help me along?

If there are other good non-floppy based methods, I'm really interested, too. Would it be worhtwhile to look for a ZIP drive, for instance?

 

[Charlieman]

Do you have a strategy for converting MacWrite Pro files into more modern formats?

If you wish to use Zip drives. you'll need two: a SCSI model for the SE or SE/30, USB for a later Mac. If you can find an Ethernet card for either old Mac, wired file transfers are best done by FTP. It's a bit clunky but it is how professional publishing was conducted in 1995. In 2015, you have to configure an FTP server and related ports (on whatever hardware) to talk to an old Mac; it can be done safely.

** Edit

If we are expected to deliver good advice, tell us more about what you are trying to achieve. What are you writing about?

 

[Elfen]

MS Works 4 & 5 works with .doc files, it depends on the system you are running on the both Macs. But for basic wordprocessing,  an SE is a good choice.

 

[jhorvath911]

At work I use ms office on my quadra 650 and then I run an ftp server on my cell phone to easily upload the files from the quadra and then download them onto windows 7 pc that I have to use.

And just as FYI I have no problem directly going from word version 5 I believe in the Mac to current version on windows machine.

 

[mraroid]

Greetings from the US to the Netherlands bom.cabedal....

I have seen SCSI to solid state converter cards on ebay but they were expensive.  I believe around $250.00 US dollars.

I bought this compact flash to SCSI card, but have yet to install it or use it so I do not know if it is any good or not.  It  cost about $125.00 US dollars to ship to US.  It comes from Japan:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CF-AztecMonster-CF-3-5inc-SCSI-Converter-Card-New-for-Vintage-Computer-/301666054722?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item463cb2b242

It fit perfect on the plastic HD sled in my color classic. You need software tools to format and init the CF card.  I believe you can not use Macintosh tools to do this.  You need 3rd party software. (someone correct me if I am wrong).

You can buy a name brand SanDisk 4GB to 8GBs or larger compact flash card on Amazon USA for about  $20.00 plus postage:

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Compact-Frustration-Free-Packaging--SDCFHS-016G-AFFP/dp/B00GHBBK82/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1434901532&sr=8-2&keywords=sandisk+compact+flash+card

I do not know if this will work or not, but it only cost $5.00:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1pcs-SD-SDHC-Secure-Digital-MMC-to-SATA-Converter-Adapter-Winodws-Mac-OS-Linux-/141695916713?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20fdbc1aa9

You can also buy very expensive, but perhaps longer lasting CF cards like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ECEVE50?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00

I suspect you can buy CF and micro SD cards locally.

Keep us posted on your project.

jack

 

[bom.cabedal]

HI all,

Thanks for all your answers. Reading back I realize that my question was formulated a bit obliquely, so allow me to tell you a bit more. I'm currently finishing two books, and I regularly write shorter pieces, varying from academic articles to newspaper columns. I'm an historian of science, who specializes in the history of paleontology, and I work at two institutions in the Netherlands.

As to the computers, as I said the SE/30 is brand new (for me), but the SE I have owned since 1989 or 1990, when I scraped together all the earnings of my paper route and extorted the rest from my parents in order to be able to purchase the machine. Before that I had an Atari ST 520+ which ran Mac software through an emulator called Spectre. All the apps had to be transferred though an AppleTalk cable at a ludicrously slow speed; but the prospect of being able to run Dark Castle or even Word on the ST kept me going. But I digress.

The SE saw me through most of my studies, until I bought a Powerbook 150 around 1995 I think, and wrote my MA thesis on that one. I even sold the SE at one point, but thankfully was able to buy it back shortly afterwards. It came in handy when working on my PhD thesis; the PoBo 150 functioned as a floppy conversion station at that stage. But the SE is in dire need of some TLC: it has become very noisy, and the floppy drive appears to be hiccuping now and then. The SE/30 appeared to be a better day-to-day compromise, particularly as I restore the other machine.

Configurations:

- SE: 4/40 with a minimal system 7.1.

- SE/30: 8/2x40 with one hard drive in its usual position, and the other mounted on its side against the case wall.

- Powerbook 150: 8/120 clinging on for dear life, but barely readable display.

Practical problems that I run into at the moment are:

- How to write to SE/30-formatted floppies on my MBPr (as I said).

- Document conversion: Word documents from 5.1 don't open on Word for Mac (2011 or 2016 Preview). I'm mostly using .rtf, which appears to work but is not ideal.

- The system on the SE/30 is 7.0.1 Dutch; I prefer to have an English-language system on it, if possible (7.1 or up). I have disk images, but I still have to get them on the SE/30 to write them to floppies.

If anyone can help me with particularly the first point, much appreciated. In general, I have to say that getting involved with these machines again has been a hoot, and I notice that my past experiences are unlocking themselves in my brain on a daily basis.

 

[Elfen]

Using a CF->USB Adapter you can format the CF under OSX or OS9 on a Desktop. And with a CF->PCMCIA Adapter, you can use any Powerbook with a PCMCIA Slot to format the CF as well. In fact, this is the better option.

Using a 190/5300/1400 running 7.6.1 with the CF in the PCMCIA slot, you can partition the CF into slices of 1.7GB or less and then format them according. Then add the system to the CF's first partition, and bless the folder.

System 6.x - 8.0 only recognizes HSF format and that uses partitions smaller than 2GB in size. Many prefer 1.7GB when using large hard drives.

- - - -

You have PC Exchange for the SE\30 or SE? This would allow you to have PC Windows and OSX file exchange through floppy. If you save the files in .doc format in Word 5, you should be able to read/write them in Word 2011. If not, you need to downgrade to Word 2008.

The PB150 needs a logic board and LCD recap. You can ask around the forum for those who can do it for details and maybe doing it for you if you cant (Uniserver, PintoDave, Ferrix97)

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23717-powerbook-140-with-screen-issues/

See video on this link by Ferrix:

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23893-powerbook-145b-also-for-140-160-145-display-capacitor-replacement-video-tutorial/

 

[bom.cabedal]

Thank you Elfen, this is very useful. Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember having used PC Exchange in the past. Since I have two complete sets of system floppies, there may be a copy of that application on one of them.

For the moment, my priority is to get the SE back to pristine, because I'm so attached to the machine. My brother jokingly observes that it has been with me longer than my wife, and that I have also fondled it far more often. Maybe that is an observation that we should not explore any further...

My feelings toward the 150 are a bit more ambivalent, since its first two hard drives died on me shortly after the purchase. They both got replaced under warranty, but in both instances the timing of their death could hardly have been worse.

 

[sstaylor]

I've not had any luck with getting a usb zip drive working on a modern (intel) mac.  Could be the drives are not functional; I've not tried them on an older usb mac.  Could be that they just aren't going to work on a newer mac.

 

[bobo68]

My 100 MB USB Zip works perfectly well here on a recent iMac. It has model number Z100USBS and is from 2002. SCSI Zips work on the SE/30. But you still have the HFS / HFS+ issue. I use a middle age Mac as an intermediary. Or you could fall back to DOS/FAT (what a shame...) but lose all Mac meta data.

If you understand some German, there is this nice site http://www.knubbelmac.de about classic compact Macs with reference tables showing which AFP versions (http://www.knubbelmac.de/themen/afp-server-vergleich.html) and filesystems (http://www.knubbelmac.de/themen/kompatibilitaetsuebersicht.html) are supported by which Mac OS version.

HTH, bobo68

 

[beachycove]

I'd think about acquiring a machine running Panther and using filesharing (or Panther Server), along with some form of localtalk to ethertalk bridge (unless you have Ethernet cards in the SE & SE/30). Unless I am mistaken (maybe it's Jaguar), both old and new machines should be able to connect to that share, and that way you can exchange files galore — as well as backup, etc..

What you really want on your SE/30, however, if working primarily with prose is Nisus Writer Pro version 5.1.3. NWP is so much better than the alternatives. Not only is it fast, and stable, but it is extremely powerful and intuitive. It is trivial, for instance, to convert a NWP file to a plain text LaTeX or Pandoc Markdown file in Nisus Writer: NWP can search for your italics or footnotes and convert them to, say, markdown *italics* or LaTeX \footnote{foo} (there is a Macro "out there" for the latter). Then you do what you need with the plain text results via Text Wrangler and pandoc, including conversion to docx. Or just splurge and buy the new Nisus Writer Pro for OSX, which at the moment is about $35 for academics, and which will open NWP files from the SE/30 just fine.

On the SE, I'd just use Nisus Writer Compact, which runs well on a 68000. Same file format, less power. Oh, and I'd use Verdana (10 point) as a screen font, or perhaps a monospaced font like Monaco. Your eyes will thank you.

As long as what you are dealing with is text, without much by way of tables or graphics, NWP is superb, and the interface (which seems so strange on a later machine with a large screen) is perfect for a Compact Mac. It is also the closest thing to a pure Text Editor that can be found in any word processor.

I have been thinking about working this way a lot lately myself, in advance of a new project — the one thing that I need to set in place to complete the package still is a half-decent reference manager system. I haven't cracked that nut yet, however.

 

[bom.cabedal]

@beachycove: thanks for those tips. Nisus is a good suggestion, although I see that v5 doesn't run on anything < System 7. Because I wish to use both my SE and SE/30 (one at home, one at the office) I would prefer to stick with my beloved System 6.0.8 if at all possible. But I'll switch to 7 if need be, the more so because I use Nisus on my MBPr anyway (it's the only thing that works together well enough with Scrivener and Bookends for creating drafts).

Your point of fonts is interesting, and after playing around for a bit I already arrived at Monaco independently from your advice. On the MBPr, I use Courier Prime (a free, much-improved version of the classic; if you're interested, look here to download: http://www.quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/) and it seems the only font that really works on the SE/30's screen.

The SE is now off to the Dutch Apple museum, a volunteer organization that also services old Macs for their supporters (I can't thank them enough, so if you're a Dutch 68K enthusiast, give them a visit at http://www.applemuseum-nederland.nl!). I've decided to leave the SE/30 cosmetically "as is" for now: no Retrobrighting. However, I am thinking of taking out both hard drives, doing a SCSI2SD conversion and installing an Ethernet card (if I can find one).

So, next step: Ethernet cards. Alas, the only place to get them appears to be eBay, and the first one I ordered from the U.S. arrived in two pieces at its destination in the Netherlands. Does anyone know of a different supplier?

 

[beachycove]

Nisus Writer Compact runs on System 6.

 

[bom.cabedal]

Yes, but while Nisus Writer reads Nisus Compact files perfectly, the reverse is not the case. Unless I missed something...

 

[beachycove]

No, it should work.

 

[bom.cabedal]

In that case, could you help me along? Because I can't make it work. Opening a Nisus Compact file in Writer Pro causes it to be converted, so any save action creates a new (.rtf) file. These files are not recognized by Nisus Compact, so this is where things appear to stop...